I get a lot of clients asking me if their META tags are important. For some reason, the matter of META tags seems to be ingrained in the mind of everybody who has ever owned an online business, probably dating back to the late 90’s or early 00’s when META information was much more important. It seems to be a subject that gets raised time after time, and just to clear things up, there is a lot more to modern SEO than these humble little tags!

As you may or may not be aware, META tags can be broken down into two categories - description and keywords. Google has stated on many occasions that it really doesn’t care about the keywords tag. The description, however, is used in it’s search results. If this is left blank, it will take the most appropriate content from the page itself and use that in the listings.

I don’t know if other search engines still look at the META keywords tag but I would hazard a guess that the worthwhile ones probably don’t.

So in short, write a good META description, but don’t worry too much about the keywords.

And if you don’t believe me, here is Matt Cutts from Google explaining just that…